Pre-intermediate

Do you have any regrets for things you did or didn't do? Listen to 70 people from 5 to 75 years old talk about their regrets. Do you share any of them?

The killing of the Japanese ex-prime minister, Shinzo Abe, shocked the whole world. Even though some of the people in Japan did not agree with his policies, the ex-prime minister’s murder is a sad event for the entire nation. 

The murder is shocking because it happened in Japan, where deaths from guns are very rare. It is also uncommon to hear about politicians being killed in developed countries. 

Please, have a look at the graphs below and discuss them with your teacher. 

There has been a lot of bad news in the last few years. Some people have decided to stop looking at the news because it's so bad. Since 2017, the number of people who avoid seeing the news has doubled in some places. The graph below shows the increase in countries around the world. Look at the graph and discuss it with your teacher.

Harvard Business Review has researched the mindsets that affect a person’s leadership ability. Here are different mindsets they have found.

Growth and Fixed Mindsets. People with a growth mindset believe that people change. Everyone can develop their abilities, intelligence, and talent. However, people with a fixed mindset believe people are born with specific skills and cannot develop them. 

Learning and Performance Mindsets. Learning mindsets mean people are motivated to learn something new just because they like learning. They want to learn without any external factors. On the other hand, people with performance mindsets are motivated to learn to get positive feedback or because they are afraid to get negative critiques. 

Society is filled with social and etiquette rules. As we grow up, we learn them and follow them without even noticing. Etiquette can be different in various situations, cultures, communities and workplaces. 

Even though people learn these rules when growing up, they are later able to distinguish the rules themselves in new cultures. However, what should we do with robots? If robots become parts of our workplace, what should we teach them?

Please, look at the task below with your teacher and discuss it.

(Exercise credit belongs to English Current)

Elon Musk is a famous Twitter user. He wants to change Twitter rules on what is allowed to be posted. However, recently he surprised everyone by saying that he would buy this social media company. Musk has been offered loans of $25.5 billion from big American banks and he promised to pay the rest of the $21 billion out of his pocket.

The next day after Musk’s proposal, the board announced they will implement a "poison pill"—a measure that forbids anyone to buy more than 15% of the company’s shares. People fear that Twitter’s shareholders will pressure the board to accept Musk’s offer. Shareholders may want to do it because the share price that Musk has offered is much higher than the current one. On the other hand, this deal means that Twitter will become private, which may lead to unknown consequences for the company. 

Many companies use personality tests to determine the characters of their employees. They say that, if colleagues know each other’s personality type, they can work together more effectively.

One famous personality test is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). It works like this. Firstly, you answer a series of questions; then, you are given four letters which indicate your personality type. You can be extroverted (E) or introverted, intuitive (I) or sensing (S), thinking (T) or feeling (F), and judging (J) or perceiving (P). How you answer the questions in the test determines the personality type you are assigned.

Different people behave in different ways. However, cultures may have a big impact on how people behave. Here are some ideas to consider during international negotiations.

1. Purpose of negotiation: signing a deal or building relationships? 

In some businesses and cultures, the aim of negotiations is to sign a contract. Other businesses aim to build a strong relationship between the parties.

A survey from “The Global Negotiator” showed that 74 percent of Spanish businesspeople set signing a contract as the goal of negotiations, but only 33 percent of the Indian executives had a similar view. It means that for some companies you need to show that you can build a long-lasting relationship, not just sign a contract. 

2. Attitude towards time

We face many fears in our lives. People are afraid of all sorts of things: from seeing spiders to talking to other people. In fact, psychologists say that social fears are the most common. According to experts, 77% of people are afraid of public speaking. So why are social fears so widespread?

The psychoanalyst Alfred Adler wrote that when we were children, we felt helpless because we depended so much on our parents. And this fear of helplessness and powerlessness might stay with us forever.

While we are growing up, we are creating an image of ourselves. We hear what people say about us and we analyze that. But in many cases, we judge ourselves in the process. We focus on the judgement more than what we learned. In other words, we tend to remember negative things about ourselves rather than the positive.